The popular plugin is no stranger to sandboxing technology, having supported sandboxing within Chrome for over an year and in Internet Explorer for longer than that. Back in late 2010, when Adobe first enabled sandboxing support in Chrome’s integrated Flash Player, the company had hinted at the possibility of the technology being extended to other browsers.

“Today, Adobe has launched a public beta of our new Flash Player sandbox (aka “Protected Mode”) for the Firefox browser,” announced Peleus Uhley, a senior security researcher at Adobe, in a blog post. “The design of this sandbox is similar to what Adobe delivered with Adobe Reader X Protected Mode and follows the same Practical Windows Sandboxing approach. Like the Adobe Reader X sandbox, Flash Player will establish a low integrity, highly restricted process that must communicate through a broker to limit its privileged activities.”

“Sandboxing technology has proven very effective in protecting users by increasing the cost and complexity of authoring effective exploits. For example, since its launch in November 2010, we have not seen a single successful exploit in the wild against Adobe Reader X.”

This particular Adobe Flash Protected Mode implementation requires Firefox 4.0 or later and supports both Windows Vista and Windows 7. The beta is available at the Adobe Labs site.

Comments

The link to getting Firefox 4 beta, in the linked story at the end of this article, actually takes you to the current nightly releases for Firefox 13 beta. Somehow I think a story about Firefox 4 release is a bit outdated and no longer useful.